Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The lights are dim. The curtains are pulled around her, as if to restrict others to know about the conspiracy. The husband is waiting on the other side of the curtain. She is waiting helplessly, her legs are resting helplessly on the stirrups. The same old process will be repeated, as is being repeated for the last two years. The doctor will put the manhood shaped device between her legs and the pain will begin again.

The doctor will try to relax her, saying good words of reliance, this will not be painful, soon you will be fertile, etc. while she will struggle to stay calm and quite and bear the same pain she is bearing again and again for the last two years. At last in unbearable pain and frustration she will start yelling and tears will continuously drop down her cheeks. This artificial insemination process had left bruises inside her womanhood, and everlasting bruises and wounds in her mind.

She cannot be a normal mother. Not again, after such a long period of time. She has enjoyed the motherhood after giving birth to her first child, their child, but the unwanted one. She can still recall the very night. It was raining outside. Thunderbolts were heard again and again. The power went off. The hotel generator started after four five minutes. Those very four five minutes were so precious for her. The smell of his chest where she was resting in peace for those four five minutes are unforgettable still. The warmth of his body and the width of his manly chest felt like a huge tree, under which she found the shelter for herself, for that night, for her life, for eternity. She never felt anything different in the heartbeat of that man, different from a man she could trust. The heartbeats never said the untold words of the man to her ears, not to trust him, not to let her become a mother, an unwanted mother.

It was again after those nine months uncertain life, she became the single mother of the girl. She named her on their names,Ebha, though, he was no more with her. He left. As an invader he had stolen the precious purity of the un-smelt flower, the untouched body of the holy earthen icon of trust and felt the pure love of the girl of twenty. He had ravaged her time and again knowingly though she never knew, until he left with the stolen wealth with him, leaving her poorer than the poorest, living on others mercies with the unwanted child.

Life could not pass by in this way. As her parents and relatives were searching for a suitable match after all these happened to her, she needed to break free. Free and independent in her life, to start enjoying her life again. A new life, a family, a small shelter of trust that she really needed.

She opposed a lot. Her family, her neighbors, her elders, no one was with her when she started living with the girl child of her, her own child, a piece of soul emerged from herself. Yet again, she became helpless. Everybody wanted her to be independent. Independence came to her for the price of leaving the child of three months, in front of the cage of the Baboons in the zoo. That too, on 15th of August, the independence day.

Still she was determined. Determined to live her life like any other average Indian woman, with her husband in their new family. She tried her best to become a good wife heading the family towards prosperity and wealth, though inside her, she kenw, she was not well. While grief and deep sighs became her best friends in solitaire, the family members of the in-laws became her worst enemies. Not that they didn't like her, but they wanted something out from her. Not giving any importance to her beauty and brains, like a child production mechanism, as treated by numerous families in the world, she was being treated by the in-laws as someone, who lacks something in that production mechanism. They tried to get a child again, a legal heir of their son, their brother, their beloved one. They persuaded him, her husband, to understand the importance of having their own child. The child who will bring the family the desired pleasure and security in future, being more important than the aging woman the mother is. The husband became so convinced after this long pursuance that he is now ready to extreme extent to get the child out of her, for the child will be his own child, his future.

Finally she is here lying helplessly on the stirrups, while the husband, waiting for the terrorizing doctor to put the semen artificially in her to get a child from her, so that he can take the child away and claim the child to be his, not her's. Time and again the husband and the doctors are trying but she is resisting this to happen, and will continue resisting.

Thanks Subhashis, my point was, a mother doesn't want (and should not be) to be one "forced" mother to give birth of children who will be claimed after their father. Like the numerous incidence happening in India.

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These are short stories written by me on lives around Kolkata and Sector V of Salt Lake City. All the characters, institutions depicted here are for the sake of the fiction and have no direct relation to any person live or dead and any such resemblance will be purely coincidental.